On Monday, April 29, John Singleton passed away, leaving behind an undeniable legacy of feature films, documentaries, and episodic television that, above all, authentically captured a segment of American life.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Singleton’s 1991 debut feature film, Boyz n the Hood created a seismic shift in Hollywood. Here was a movie about three-dimensional black characters living in South L.A., who were facing issues that all teens face — burgeoning sexuality, preparing for college, and conflicts with parental figures — while also facing circumstances unique to black folks in that neighborhood: internalized racism, gentrification, an opioid crisis, police violence, and how structural racism leads to intra-racial violence.

Boyz n the Hood never became maudlin or preachy. It was grounded in humor and the clear-eyed analysis of Singleton’s experiences; it was all the more remarkable that he accomplished this at the tender age of 23.

Peter Ramsey, whose film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse recently won an Oscar for 2018's best animated film, was there from the beginning, having grown up in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles, close to where Singleton was from. Ramsey worked as a storyboard artist on Boyz and also served as second-unit director on Singleton’s films Poetic Justice, Higher Learning, and Rosewood.

“[Working with Singleton] was like seeing somebody catch lightning in a bottle,” Ramsey, who remained friends with Singleton for 30 years, tells Teen Vogue. “John was kind of representative of a moment in time that was really new and dynamic, and something that people, most people, I will say, outside of the black community had definitely not known about before. He was really bringing something to light to a lot of people in a way that captured people's imaginations. He was so confident and self-possessed, and had a clear vision of what he wanted to say and how he was going to say it, and had deep knowledge of how to craft a message using the medium of film.”

Sam Bailey, a 30-year-old filmmaker and cocreator of the hit Web series Brown Girls, says she regularly revisits Singleton’s work to inform her creative process. “John Singleton was this giant in my mind; he broke into the scene in such an unapologetic way that I never doubted he deserved to be there,” she says. “He was the first filmmaker I saw that reminded me of folks I knew. Boyz n the Hood is one of those movies I go back to at least once a year: He showed me what it looks like to explore the humanity within black people, without having to prove the humanity to others.”

Boyz n the Hood earned Singleton two Oscar nominations, one for best screenplay and one for best director, making him the youngest person and first black person to receive that honor. It also launched the film careers of Cuba Gooding, Jr., Regina King, Morris Chestnut, and Ice Cube. Singleton continued to make work that illustrated how the personal and the political are always intertwined. He explored social criticism in Higher Learning and Rosewood; looked at the interior love lives of black people in Poetic Justice and Baby Boy; and in Marion Jones: Press Pause, he highlighted a controversial athlete for the 30 for 30 sports series.

With every release, Singleton launched more film careers (i.e., Mo’Nique, Taraji P. Henson, Tyrese, and Omar Gooding), and his films immediately embedded themselves within the collective cultural imagination. Several young filmmakers, TV showrunners, and hip-hop artists like Justin Simien, Issa Rae, Vince Staples, and Kendrick Lamar have paid homage to Singelton's works, either directly or indirectly, in recent years.

Advertisement

For filmmaker Tchaiko Omawale, who recently directed the coming-of-age film Solace and is part of the all-women directing roster of the upcoming season of Queen Sugar, Singleton’s work spoke to her directly. “I grew up overseas where seeing black people onscreen was rare,” she says. “I would have to say Poetic Justice was the biggest deal for me out of all John’s films, because my teenage heart was drawn to the tenderness between Janet [Jackson] and Tupac’s characters. Plus, Janet was one of the few black women in entertainment that I had access to growing up in Thailand; it was huge for me.”

Nijla Mu’min, the 33-year-old award-winning writer and director of Jinn, says Poetic Justice also resonated with her, especially because she also writes poetry. “Poetic Justice was one of the first films I’d seen that honored the complex interior life of a black woman through poetry,” Mu’min says via email. “Maya Angelou’s poetry [used in the film] lent a pure, tender, affecting undercurrent of emotion to Justice's character. As a young poet at that time, I was moved by the merging of those mediums, and how seamlessly they flowed together.”

Mu’min, a Bay Area native who won the Special Jury Recognition for writing at SXSW in 2018, adds that in her films she paired her own poetry and prose to add depth to her characters. “In my feature debut, Jinn, the main character, Summer, is a poet and a dancer,” she says. “Early works, like Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash), Poetic Justice, and Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons) honored the black poetic tradition through voice-over in beautiful, arresting ways.”

Many contend that what made Singleton a treasure was that his love for black people was reflected in his work; he never reduced African Americans to tropes and always created complicated protagonists.

“You didn’t have to know John personally to understand him,” says Jordan Hall, a creative executive whose father, film producer Paul Hall, was a close friend of Singleton’s. “If you saw any of his films, you knew exactly who he was and what he was trying to say. In spite of feeling like his death interrupted all of our lives, his family, closest friends, and the audiences that came to see his films, I realized John had been just as much of a disruptive artist in life that he was in death.”

Hall says she met Singleton when she was six years old, and at that time had no idea he was an acclaimed filmmaker. “I just knew that he was my dad’s best friend and that, apart from their families, they loved making movies together more than anyone or anything else in the entire world. Over the last 27 years, my dad and John became each other’s champions; but equally important, they leaned on each other as they navigated their way through not only filmmaking but also fatherhood.”

Hall also shared an anecdote from when she was a child on the set of Higher Learning, Singleton’s prescient 1995 film about a group of freshmen becoming politically awakened amid a sexual assault, anti-blackness sentiment, and the rise of a white nationalist group on the campus of the fictional Columbus University.

“I remember I was scared, so I asked John, ‘Do the black people win?’ And he said, ‘The black people always win in my movies.’ Many years later whenever I would see him, he would remind me of this moment and tease me. Now I realize that when I asked him that, it wasn’t about being black or white, I was asking him if I mattered and he was telling me I did, and that I belonged. It is this universal understanding of belonging that you would feel when you watched his films... John always created beautifully flawed, fully realized characters that we could relate to.”

Advertisement

Ramsey hopes people remember his friend “as a kind, generous person” who loved the craft, was sincere about his mission and his personal warmth: “I'm very sad that he's gone. It's terrible. It's terrible. It's unfair. He was way too young. But he squeezed every drop out of life. He really did.”